Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick). I don't know why that would be more surprising than Obama's prize. Kissinger donated the money to charity and didn't turn up to the awards ceremony, he didn't think he deserved it. I don't understand why Obama was awarded the prize at all.
According to Samantha Power's memoirs and interview, Obama and the whole Obama administration felt the same. They felt just awkward.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
To me it feels like the Norwegians were also fanboying (and fangirling) hard over the charismatic guy. I also find him very charismatic, but hey, it doesn't influence my job and even if it does, I'm not in charge of judging who gets a globally recognized prize...
Fanboying over the promise of Obama and also over the turning away from the Bush era Project for a New American Century, which was beginning to look like a long term US plan at that point.
It looked like a promising new era and they were not the only ones swept up in that.
I think Obama was awarded the prize, basically, because he was not Bush. It was the zeitgeist of that time. We (and by we, I mean most people in the planet) were really tired of the Bush administration exploits.
Kissinger could help to establish a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it feels like the things they did in Cambodia before that, should subtract some points for a Peace Prize.
> Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick).
Nixon was elected in 1968 with Kissinger as his National Security advisor, and they assumed their posts in early 1969. That means he held off an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam for 6 years - and that was the only legitimate course of action.
While it's true that he did spend time negotiating a potential cease fire / armistice, he and Nixon continued an illegitimate war of aggression in a foreign country, trying to prop up a puppet regime.
But that's not all: Kissinger initiated the US campaign in Cambodia, in which, over several years, hundreds of thousands were killed. See:
My point was that giving the prize to an American diplomat for taking a break from his collaboration with Nixon to try to end the imperialist war that we started, on terms agreeable to us, after at least a million Vietnamese people were killed, is insane. He also got behind the bombing in Cambodia as a way to force North Vietnam to capitulate to American demands. This is not a man you award a peace prize to unless your idea of peace includes Carthaginian peace.
The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions, not just when giving it to American politicians:
• In the 1920s, Britain and France got the Peace Prize for telling Germany that it's allowed to attack Poland, and Germany received it as well for graciously accepting these terms.
• The International Peace Bureau and Inter-Parliamentary Union got multiple prizes for the great accomplishments of existing, despite having achieved nothing of note in the 120+ years of their existence.
• Similarly, the League of Nations got several prizes in the first few years of existence (when everyone was too broke to afford another war anyway), despite being a toothless paper tiger that did nothing to prevent WW2.
• Kellogg received the prize in 1930 for a treaty he organized in 1929, which failed as early as 1931.
And that's just the questionable awards up until 1930. Its track record later isn't much better.
I don't have any objections to this year's laureates (though I'm not too familiar with their works), but ultimately, the question is whether the prize is living up to its high expectations, and if not, what should be done to improve it.
> The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions
And that is supposed to be a bad thing? If they only give out trophies for feats accomplished years ago that prize would be worthless decoration.
The whole point is that the prize offers acknowledgment and support. It is not magic, as you point out, but it does not have to be.
No, that is telling you you are asking the wrong question. They all started the same way and were intended to stay that way. For hard sciences they changed anyways because ..., this is not the case for this one.
They didn't change, the very first Nobel prizes in the other categories, including literature, so it's not just the hard sciences were awarded for lifetime achievements.
If you want to be condescending, at least have an idea of what you're talking about. Just stop now.
Nobel's will specified that the prizes were supposed to be handed out for the greatest contributions done during the last 12 months. They've slowly moved away from that, since as your examples demonstrate, it's hard to judge the lasting impact of anything that fast.
Nobel put the same clause in for all the prizes, but in all other categories, this clause was ignored even for the very first Nobel prize in each category: They've been mostly consistent in awarding them as recognition of life works, at most for topics that have been recognized in their field for longer, but were of recent public interest and thus could fall within the 12 months clause based on reporting on such older works that stood the test of time.
The peace prize is the only one that regularly ignores this informal guideline and goes for what must be assumed to be cheap publicity grabs.
* They knew about the heinous crimes for which recipients such as Kissinger had already been responsible. (With Obama this is somewhat less of an issue, but he already had a record as US senator and president for a few months; and those did not suggest a future worthy of a peace prize, to say the least).
* They knew those recipients were not penitent regarding their crimes.
* They never acknowledged the awardings of these people as a mistake.
So - they got it right, in their view. It's just that your or my idea of what's right is not theirs.
I already gave the two examples necessary to address this.
- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.
- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.
So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.
Instead of looking at people as good and bad, it helps to look at them as people who do good and bad things, to be slightly more accurate.
I look at the Peace Prize as being awarded for certain things people do, not as an endorsement of every action they have done in their life. The language from this year's prize committee makes this rather plain.
It's not like it is the same people now who were on the committee when either of those were chosen to receive it the current member who have been on it for the longest got appointed in 2012
That's not what salting does, and different hashing methods are irrelevant. The danger of having your hash leaked is that it can be cracked and the plaintext password recovered. The hash itself is entirely useless for logging into other services.
Any time conditions exist for someone who doesn't care about others to get what they want, that person will try to get what they want. That's not particularly insightful on its own. That's like the one-sentence synopsis of the entire field of critical theory. Go read Marx, or feminist theory, or critical race theory, or something. This fixation on child sexual abuse as an inevitable consequence of power seems like some weird right-wing conspiracy stuff, especially unironically using the words "The Taliban certainly has its faults but."
Taking my comment as right wing is interesting to me. Personally I have found that it transcends the left and right wing labels and applies generally to those in power, that is why I included things like sports and the Catholic Church was previously mentioned. Is it your observation that it occurs more in what you consider left wing organizations?
No, it's my observation that conspiracy theories about organized child sex abuse are largely a right-wing narrative. For example:
> QAnon (/ˌkjuː.əˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring
It plays into classic themes of degeneracy and a need to return to traditionalism, and is designed to shock and whip up passions among the family-values crowd.
But it's the comment about the Taliban that really showed your hand. The meme on the right is a grudging admiration for the Taliban because of their highly conservative social ideology; i.e. commitment to traditional gender roles, forbidding abortion, persecuting trans people, etc.
Hitler was a vegetarian atheist, ergo most vegans are Nazis? You should try to separate the idea from the mind who holds it. Calling me alt right because I've noticed that many powerful people where friendly with a convicted pedophile after his conviction does nothing to refute my argument.
You make it sound like priests are just bad at maximizing their income, so they must be damaged somehow. But putting it in economic terms like that is silly. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle. Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause. Reducing everything to a dollar amount is some weird sigma shit.
Though I agree... there's probably no coordinated conspiracy of abusers covering for other abusers, just a pervasive culture of secrecy and willingness at all levels to do anything to protect the clergy. And seriously, who thought it would be a good idea to sexually stunt young people with religious indoctrination, get them to swear to a vow of chastity, and then go their whole lives without sex or porn, and think it'll just be fine to trust them absolutely in situations of incredibly significant power imbalance? Like organizational reform aside, this doesn't seem fixable for the church. It's too fundamental to their whole model. They'll keep going because they have so much momentum, but more victims are going to keep getting hurt.
>. Priests aren't in it for the money or an easy lifestyle
Right, which immediately rules out like 95% of Catholic men from even considering the occupation. There aren't a lot of applicants to the job.
>Similarly I don't think the church is so worried about optimizing their training costs that it could be a plausible root cause.
Each priest has received 4-5 years of training that the Church paid for. Basically every other industry would also bend over backwards to save their ~$100,000 investment when they already have the hiring problem I mentioned.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post, Catholicism has a lot of problems. Even without those problems, they act like a lot of other companies that make similar choices of overlooking abuse because it's profitable to do so.
>Yeah, imagine what kind of nerd would be interested in the field and genuinely want to learn all they can, ha ha.
Yeah, this comment grinds my gears.
So much "knowledge" in the software world (and parts of academia, and probably many other parts of society) is completely arbitrary bullshit that gets perpetuated because people who are familiar with it want to maintain their position of authority.
Actively taking pride in this is not inherently a good thing.
Honestly, I had things like WiX and CMake in my mind when responding to you, but the tweet you linked to seems pretty fair too.
So many "nerdy" circles seem to be plagued by this subculture where your competence or intelligence is measured by how much obscure and useless knowledge you can accrue.
The fact that Max's experience creating and maintaining the single best package manager on macOS (by a country mile, too) was considered less important than whether or not he knew the minutiae of a particular form of logic puzzle is bullshit, and I can completely synpathise him in that regard.
I actually do think you have a point about the fetishization of trivia knowledge in this field. It's really not ideal, and I think it's more driven by social dysfunction or over-compensation for various kinds of imposter syndrome.
But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can't do it, but he doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!
That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears. I'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value to customers and fix bugs and string together code and everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far without even a glimmer of curiosity about the fundamentals of computer science then something is disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.
>> But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm.
The thing is that most programmers are not computer scientists anymore, in the same way that most computer scientists are not mathematicians anymore. In many CS101 courses there's only a very brief study of algorithms and data structures and most of the course is about using this or that language (probably python, these days, java back in the day, Ada further back etc).
This is partly the fault of universities, in a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of way. Universities try to prepare their students for the industry, except they seem to be in lockstep with the industry's requirements, but with a ten-year gap. So they try to teach students programming, rather than computer science, because they believe that's what the industry is asking for, then the students go to interviews and find themselves staring at a binary tree on a whiteboard.
Also, to be fair, the majority of programmers nowadays are not nerds, anymore, and they're not even that interested in computers, or even progamming. Most of my class in my degree and in my Master's just wanted a cozy job at an office. In one company where I was hired through a graduate programme, all of the guys in my cohort came in with a qualification in CS, then immediately sought the better-paying manager jobs in the corp (and I left to go to academia because [edit:] they didn't let me train neural nets on their mainframes :P).
>That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears.
I do get where you're coming from there, but I interpreted the Tweet very differently. He wasn't just asked "how does a binary tree work?", but asked to go through an extremely specific process manually, on a whiteboard.
And if I can just interject my one little quip (I come from a EEE background, stumbled into software engineering and then left after a couple of years to do my own thing), all of this knowledge of the academic aspects of CompSci doesn't seem to help people build code that is reliable and performant. We weren't taught it in EEE (we learned about programming and digital logic, but in a different, much more concrete way), and yet EEE-written code runs flawlessly on 8-bit micros in safety-critical systems for decades at a time without a single crash or missed timing constraint.
Because it's very simple- compared to a web app backend (which is typically an uhonly mess of unnecessary complication; but still, much more complex for that).
I usually don't need complex algorithms in my line of work, but I can't count how many times I've needed to implement topological sorts, for instance, or non-trivial tree traversals, or to rewrite code to increase parallelism, or to be able to quickly spot that a poorly performing algorithm was O(n^2) or O(n^3).
And sometimes, it actually gets complicated. Sometimes, it's about increasing cache hits. Sometimes, it's about making sure that stuff gets allocated in the right order or in the right place in memory. Sometimes, it's about rewriting the IPC layer. Sometimes, it's about reimplementing foreign key logics in a low-level database/file system. Sometimes, it's about writing custom locking data structures or non-blocking algorithms, or a custom memory allocator or GC to match specific performance requirements. Sometimes, you need to do all of this without a debugger or a profiler or even logging.
If you can't handle the simple tasks from the first list, well, how are you going to tackle the issues from the second?
And if you're not curious, how are you going to learn all of this?
I agree, uses for this kind of knowledge do come up from time to time, but when you're implementing something like this on the job, are you starting from nothing, a blank piece of paper/whiteboard?
Personally I wouldn't start writing a single line without doing some research first. I'd look around on the web for some sample implementations or at least pseudocode. I'd probably get one of my algorithm books down from the shelf to make sure I understand the basics -- and check for "gotcha" edge cases.
So this is still wildly different than Max's interview environment, where the expectation is that you can effectively invent the algorithm.
I'd argue that, for many problems, researching the issue is hard if you don't have a starting point. For instance, I currently have no clue about the natural language manipulation with machine learning. I would have strictly no idea where to start or where to start looking. I might be lucky and stumble upon some literature that I would understand, but then I might not.
Couldn't a good lead suggest an engineer learn this after-the-fact?
Also do most software problems involve optimizations at scale like at Netflix or Google ? It seems mismatched to assume that an esoteric use case is the gold standard.
I'm talking of my own experience. I've had to do most of these things (or variants thereof) either while working on Firefox or various experiments at Mozilla, or while working at various startups.
I'm sure that not all companies need this kind of skill. But I'm not surprised if Google feels that they do.
I would go a slightly different track after seeing comments on OPs linked article making fun of people who know what ACID compliance means WRT databases.
The point of interviewing about algos or ACID or SOLID is fast inter-team communication and less wasted effort.
So you have two sysadmins talking about some database's filesystem options and they talk about sync-writes vs non-sync writes and they immediately see a problem they need to research WRT ACID's "D" and sync writes and there are of course many solutions historically and workarounds and on the whiteboard they just look at each other and say "ACID's D" and the other nods knowingly and they know what to research and are on the same page and it took about 30 seconds total interaction. I mean two people who know about durability and sync writes are going to like "wink and nod" and they're on the same page and they're both productive in minutes.
Then you meet some joker who don't wanna learn nothing about nothing he just does stuff that seems to work and googles for how to fix it later, and the guy doesn't even know the concept of what the "D" in ACID means and when the tickets start rolling in, tries to reinvent the wheel all himself and its just awful to see and he can't explain it was well as a textbook or wikipedia and you try to point out this is all old stuff "Everybody doing DBMS stuff should know" and "eh its just some trivia thing from the old days nobody knows like back when you wrote Perl for money" and its just a train wreck watching the guy. OR he doesn't get hired for the position because only 50 bazillion social media posts explain this employer loves "useless trivia stuff" and if you know anything about DBMS the concept of the ACID acronym makes so much obvious sense you can learn it well enough to BS past an interview in like two minutes, if you're a DBA worth anything. But nah they're too lazy, which is how its gonna be day to day if they get hired accidentally and nobody wants to deal with laziness either.
The guy who invented homebrew and famously couldn't get hired at google wasn't not-hired because he couldn't flip a binary tree, but was not-hired because he couldn't talk like a programmer with programmers about programmer stuff quickly in a standard documentable format in the trivial and non-commercial sense of flipping a binary tree. So he could have memorized every algo just in case, or he could have learned to talk like a programmer with programmers about programmer stuff but he never did either, so ... that didn't work out well for him.
As a terrible car analogy you wanna hire two car mechanics to change tires at a tire shop and one guy knows all the names for all the tools and parts and can at least BS plausibly at the interview how to fix something obscure like a malfunctioning TPMS, at least his answer sounded believable or rational if not perfect. The other guy doesn't know the names of any of the parts "This is the growly thing that twists the shiny things off the side of the heavy bouncy circles" and you ask him how he'd troubleshoot a broken TPMS in a general sense and he fires back about he don't know no fancy words but he's been changing tires for years and it'll probably be OK eventually. And you're like "Dude, you interviewed at a F-ing tire shop and read online that we'd ask about TPMS systems but couldn't be arsed to bother even looking up what the acronym means?"
That is a big part of it I think, and just being able to provide meaningful names for code/documentation/discussions makes a huge difference, though I'd say communication problems alone don't tell the whole story.
Even when you're just working alone, having seen something before and knowing the theory/literature means you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a locking mechanism to manually serialize database transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance. Or if you're working on some task tracking application and wondering about how you can untangle dependency relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of being mired down in retreading basics that every CS graduate already knows.
Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.
I'm a VP of Engineering now and I made it here without ever having to do any of the above and most engineers I've worked with haven't had to do any of that either. Your experience isn't the norm and you also sound incredibly arrogant and out of touch.
Exactly, the technical interview has become like an arms race, harder and harder questions. Whereas in the management track, its all hustlin, any bozo can and will become a manager and go up the ladder, gain more power and control all us technical folks.
I should not comment on this chain, just adding clarity on my behalf... all I've done in my "career" is web related stuff, mostly JavaScript paired with a backend... I've never used BT/BST only recently learned it for myself just to know what it is.
If you went through a CS path then I would say you should know about it. I'm trying to pick it up due to FOMO. I hear about it.
Notably, he wasn't actually asked to invert a binary tree in the interview (this would not be a desirable question internally for anything other than screens) and he wasn't told why he failed the interview process. So given the response, I'm not certain that it wasn't his attitude during the interview process that sunk him.
It's hard to tell whether your comment was sarcastic or serious, but the guy invented homebrew, and was passed over for as you say, not knowing fundamental things. I'd flip the script in this narrative: by passing over the author of a wildly popular piece of software, the interviewers showed their missing knowledge of fundamental things - like good business sense. No thanks, Google.
And what does Google invent, anyway, given that their biggest financial successes have been acquisitions?
Whereupon a huge proportion of early bugs were programmers who believed they were easily smart enough to write doubly linked list handling methods proceeded to ongoingly and continually screw up writing doubly linked list handling methods while refusing to use standard functions.
There is no "standard library function" for inverting a binary tree. That's not a thing that exists, probably anywhere in any standard library for any language, and even if it did you should still know how to write it yourself.
Also the article you linked doesn't argue that you shouldn't know how to write a linked list, it argues that you should implement ADT operations in functions instead of trying to wing it with ad-hoc logic all over the place. Blizzard's developers were definitely smart enough implement a doubly-linked list one time, they were just fallible humans who got tripped up consistently implementing the same logic in a hundred different places.
It depends on why you are interested in the field. Some people inherently enjoy it. I personally enjoy the ability it gives me to create stuff. It is the closest thing to magic in my view.
That is why I find Leetcode dull. I can't really do much with it as if I needed it, I would pull it from a library.
As someone who at one point was interested and learned all I could about the things that interested, I can say majority of it is useless, and dismissed if it ever comes u in an inter.
The article says why. The US Chamber of Commerce has fought tooth and nail against climate legislation because they view themselves as "job creators" and see anything that threatens corporate profits as an existential threat to society.
They've only recently been forced to admit that climate change even exists, but it's still like pulling teeth because they insist that any solutions have to be technology driven from the private sector, with no mandates whatsoever from government.
AI is not conscious being. Yet. In the future, once we have AGI - yes, these laws and society will need to change to accept them, rather than enslave. But currently AI is just a buzzword.
The goal of AI is not to create consciousness, it’s to help humans. And we have no ability to prove/disprove consciousness in anything anyway but we choose to believe it exists because each of us knows it inside ourselves.
If we create a box of metal, matrices, and silicone and tell ourselves it’s conscious it will be our own hubris that leads to additional competition for shared resources and further human inequality/suffering. Such lines of reasoning make me very concerned.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the goal of AI".
First, different researchers or their funders presumably have very different motivations. Compete with China, fire all our employees, become famous as an inventor, make lots of money, work on something interesting ...
Second, at some point AI's are likely to have their own goals and "help humans" quite famously is not guaranteed to be their North Star.
